Sikh Nationalism

THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES, 2023

Rview of Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-religious Diaspora. By Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xiv, 262 pp. ISBN: 9781316501887.

Sikh Nationalism

It reviews Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Nationality to an Ethno-religious Diaspore, and points out how the Sikh identity has been de-territorialized.

2002

In recent years, Sikh nationalism has attracted much scholarly attention. Whilst some scholars have focused on 'the struggle for Sikh sovereignty'within the Indian state of Punjab (Pettigrew 1995, Deol 2000, Singh 2000), others have stressed the key role played by the Sikh diaspora in the search for statehood (Tatla 1999, Axel 2001).

2000

In modernist approaches, the religious and cultural homogeneity upon which Sikh elites have based their claims for nationhood is itself a recent invention, a product of elite or colonial manipulation. Particular attention has been paid to the activities of the Singh Sabha movement in the late nineteenth century and their elucidation of a tat khalsa discourse which became hegemonic in the twentieth century.

Sikh Formations, 2023

Despite significant advances in Sikh studies, Sikh nationalism is still poorly understood. As a complex community with competing narratives of self-identityas a religion, as an ethnicity, and as a global and national minority (in India and in the diaspora)-Sikh nationalism requires an integrated framework that recognises the rich symbolic heritage and how the nation and state-building projects of India and Pakistan have defined Sikh politics. Such a framework also needs to rethink the role of the diaspora as the agent of long-distance nationalism against the background of the rise of religious nationalisms.

It is difficult to disentangle religion from politics in the troubled history of intercommunal relationships in Punjab. This entanglement is most apparent in the Sikh call for statehood and identity. This dissertation seeks to identify the processes by which religion became ethnonationalism in the Sikh context. It argues that the call for self-determination and statehood, sometimes expressed by the idea of ‘Khalistan’ is rooted in religion but expressed as a political aspiration shaped by the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism through Hindutva politics. Punjab has a long history of rule by external powers, most notably the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. The Sikh community experienced both flourishing and oppression at different points in these Empires, but this dissertation argues that the last act of the British Empire; namely, Partition; was catastrophic for the identity of the Sikh community. It argues that the rise of Hindu nationalism post-Partition, though an understandable reaction to Colonialism, has had significant negative consequences for the Sikh community; a minority in India, which now finds itself in many ways disenfranchised in what is left of its homeland. These and associated events have combined to generate the shift from the apolitical religious practice of the past to identity politics and ethnonationalism for contemporary Punjabi Sikhs.

Sikh Formations, 2012

This paper explores the nature of the diasporic Sikh nationalism in the post-1984 period. Generally labelled as a movement for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, overseas Sikhs' reaction was a highly emotional demonstration of anger and protest at the desecration of the Golden Temple in Amritsar -the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. While it seems certain that most Sikhs were suddenly made aware of the lack of state power, the strategy and ideas advocated by various Sikh leaders and their organisations did not produce a sustainable movement. The paper discusses reasons why such a widespread and shared diasporic nationalist movement failed to generate ideas and appropriate strategies for statehood and instead subsided with pleas fro recognition.

International Journal of Sikh Studies

This paper sees the contestation over Sikh role in 1857 as the issue of two competing nationalisms and attempts to tie up multiple and tangled aspects of the relationship between Punjabi/Sikh nationalism and Indian nationalism with the aim of drawing up as clear a picture as possible of the Sikh role in 1857.

The paper seeks to analyse the complex interconnection between the identity politics of the Sikh community in the diaspora and the Sikh homeland politics in India. Building on the history of Sikhism, the paper focuses on the continuity and changes in the nature of political activism of the Sikhs both in the diaspora and homeland in the context of globalisation.

Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity (eds.) C. Shackle, Gurharpal Singh and Arvindpal Singh Mandair. London: Curzon Press. 161-185pp, 2001

How has the idea of Punjab as a Sikh homeland become ‘naturalised’ among the Sikh diaspora? How has the incipient Indian nationalism of early Sikh migrants been replaced by the Punjab as an imagined homeland? Any study aiming to charter such radical transformation in an ethnic community's outlook towards its land of origins will be an arduous task. This paper has a more limited objective of presenting related literature which bears on this issue, and suggests some possible conditions and events which might have contributed to the construction of Punjab as a Sikh homeland among the Sikh diaspora.